by Norman Stone
A central matter, here, was that the Pope was a Pole. Karol Wojtyła was elected on 16 October 1978, having been Archbishop of Cracow, the most religious city in Poland. He had risen from the pious lower-middle class, and brought enthusiasm to everything (he was even in his youth a good amateur actor). He knew his Communists, and told people, even in 1946 when he was just a parish priest, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll finish themselves off.’ But he was also a good tactician: the formidable Cardinal Prince Sapieha promoted him, and when he went to Rome, though he did not like the changes in the Church that came with Vatican II, he was careful not to make a personal issue of things. He was also a considerable intellectual, very well-read in Catholic philosophy and able, when he invited the world’s philosophers to the Vatican, to hold his own. Other Popes before him had either been deeply troubled about the modern world, not really knowing what to do, or perhaps too keen to go along with it. John Paul II — the name he took — had no doubts. He really came from the triumphalist world of the later nineteenth century, when Leo XIII, with Rerum Novarum in 1891, had made an effort to reconcile Catholicism with socialism. Here, Leo had quoted Aquinas from the thirteenth century — when ‘capitalism’ had started — and tried to identify a Christian answer. The Conservative Party in England belonged in this context, and the Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany were exemplars; perhaps, even, the most interesting question in France is why there never was an equivalent. Pope John Paul certainly had the measure of the modern world, and had a good idea as to how it might be managed. For instance, he did not bother very much with the media, and had his chauffeur read out a fortnightly summary of the press in the back of the car. He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food. However, he had a wonderful sense of timing, of stage presence (much admired by Sir John Gielgud), and a papal appearance was a memorable occasion. In Poland the audiences were in hundreds of thousands. It was the man and the hour. On 13 May 1981 Mehmet Ali Ağca tried to kill the Pope. There was a Bulgarian connection; Ağca himself was a Turkish Fascist who had already murdered the editor of a Turkish left-wing newspaper and had mysteriously escaped from his prison. The circumstances have never been explained, even by Ağca himself after long years of incarceration: he seems to have lost his mind. But it would not have been stupid on the KGB’s part to want rid of this Pope: for he did destroy them.
Communist Poland now disintegrated, at any rate down to its most basic parts. Gierek had a heart attack, was even imprisoned for a year and in the event he died in 2001 aged not far off a hundred. He was succeeded by a nonentity, Stanisław Kania. Communist Poland was now down to its essence, the army, in the shape of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 9 December 1981 Marshal Viktor Kulikov, as head of the Warsaw Pact forces, moved on Warsaw. On the 12th, at night, roadblocks were set up, borders were sealed, and special troops moved on the telephone exchanges with long axes to cut the wires abroad. At 6 a.m. on came the general, national anthem to the fore, sternness of gaze, while tanks patrolled the streets outside. It was a military coup. In military form, Jaruzelski was almost a fossil of the Kołakowski generation. It was not that he believed in Communism, but he did believe that the Poles must find a method of living with Russia, that the great mistake of the country’s history was to fail to do so. A good part of the aristocracy had thought the same, sometimes with a corrupt side, in the Convention of Targowice in the age of Catherine the Great (1792). Some priests at that time had behaved in a suicidally nationalist manner. Pope John Paul was determined not to let this happen again: the Church would this time have a strategic sense. He managed matters in Poland. He had gone there in May 1979, to an audience of 400,000 in Plac Zwyciestwa, and through Cardinal John Krol in the USA he had a good contact with Reagan. This Pope was not at all popular with the media, but the morning Mass in the Vatican was crowded as never before. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. This time round, a million people turned up for the Black Virgin at Częstochowa, and some pilgrims betook themselves there from Warsaw on their knees. The Politburo in Moscow were apoplectic. They had Afghanistan on their hands, and no-one wanted to repeat the experience of Prague in 1968 let alone Budapest in 1956. The only hope was that the Poles would themselves do something.
In September-October 1980 there were agreements of the government with Solidarność, in the context of a strike threat, and coal output going down by 90,000 tons and inflation at 12 per cent. In mid-January 1981 Jaruzelski took over the government — a weird figure, be-corseted because of lumbago, and wearing dark spectacles because of eye problems that went back to the privations of resettlement in 1940. He did ask Brezhnev for troops but the entire Politburo voted against this: he would have to do it on his own. Nine million Poles were now in Solidarność. On 3 April 1981 he and Kania, the Party chief, by now, as was solemnly recorded in Politburo minutes, a very serious drunk, went to Brest-Litovsk. Solidarność held a conference in the autumn and there were Soviet descents on Warsaw — the head of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, and even the minister of foreign affairs, Andrey Gromyko. The Communist Party sacked all but eighteen of the Central Committee and Gierek was the scapegoat as the economy now crashed: there was not even tea to be had at hotel bars in Lublin. By November 1981 matters were in place for a declaration of martial law. A colonel, Ryszard Kuklinski, told the Americans. Jaruzelski took over the Party and tried to have Solidarność in a subordinate role, which Wałęsa refused; on 13 December 1981 WRON, the national security council, of fifteen generals and a cosmonaut took over. Wałęsa was put in a comfortable villa with his wife (seventh time pregnant) and apologetic generals. It had been Gomułka’s and he was there for seven months. There was no European reaction — quite the contrary, as Claude Cheysson even said, ‘socialist renewal’ was at stake. There were problems as soldiers took over the mines and the Seym produced a huge reform package that meant decentralization, etc., but it led nowhere. There were over 10,000 internments, and over 150,000 ‘prophylactic discussions’ but the overtones were farcical. If you lifted the hotel telephone you were told ‘Rozmowa kontrolowana’, meaning that someone was listening. That the tape was old and wheezing did not inspire fear, and conversations with the Polish intelligentsia anyway consisted of funny stories.
At any rate, Moscow was having considerable difficulty in digesting Poland, but there was worse. Could Poland digest the Soviet Union? There was an imponderable, television. Telecommunications were now such that in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union truth could be told: people would know that they lived ‘like dogs’, as Richard Pipes’s fellow traveller had known in fifties Leningrad. Maybe in Brezhnev’s time the blockage of information meant that most Soviet citizens imagined that the West still lived in the world of Dickens’s novels, that the imperialized Third World was only waiting for shining tomorrows courtesy of Moscow. But cameras could now be dropped in the remotest places, from there to beam instant images to a waiting world (Robert Harris’s Archangel has a good description of the process). In East Germany Western television had generally been available, such that the inhabitants were under no illusions as to the relative poverty of their living conditions — as Enzensberger said, Communism was the highest stage of underdevelopment, and East Germany was a state that sich selber mitmacht, an imitation of itself, as Musil had called Austria-Hungary. This line was now true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What was to be done? A sign that matters were going out of control was that the secret police took charge.
This situation was not at all new for the bosses in the Kremlin. In 1921 the West had not followed the Bolsheviks’ pattern. There had been no revolution, or at any rate not a 1917, in Germany. By rights, the Germans should have produced one, and for a few weeks there had been workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model. But then there had been deals — the Social Democrats with the generals, the trade unions with the bosses — and the final revolution was not Lenin’s but Hitler’s. Moscow had re
sponded by finding common ground with Berlin. Now there was a wooden replay of this, an effort to separate the Europeans from the USA. ‘Our common European home’, an old tune of Molotov’s in 1954, came up again under Brezhnev.
In 1921 Lenin had responded quite creatively. In the short term the Revolution had failed. There was famine, and there were revolts. In 1920 the peasants were given a New Economic Policy, by which private buying and selling had again been allowed. Then there had been an approach to the Germans, and German industrialists and even military officers had co-operated with the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik diplomats put on white ties, appeared in the West, talking good French, and money came their way. On the whole, the West did not really understand 1917. Why could the Bolsheviks not be bought, like everybody else? Now in the 1980s, as Moscow saw the failure of everything, everywhere, that calculation came back in great force. Lenin is said to have said, around 1921, that there were Western ‘useful idiots’ who would talk about feminism or ecology or town planning or humanism and who could be put on the same platform as Bolsheviks whose intentions were to take over the planet. Now Moscow came up with the last useful idiot, Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev, in himself an obviously decent man, whose task was to soft-soap the West. Seeing him in action, Yuri Lyubimov, a theatrical producer of genius, scratched his head and wondered as to whom Gorbachev reminded him of. He said, at last, ‘Chichikov’, the anti-hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who worked out a scheme for buying serfs whose deaths had not been recorded — a scheme which in the short term makes Chichikov appear to be a great landowner, but which ends in farcial collapse. In the Soviet Union, there were many equivalents.
The statistics of the seventies could not conceal a slowing down and even a reversal of the economy. Labour was no longer migrant, and construction — its forte — slowed down. In the sixties labour began to run short, then in the seventies arable land, then in the eighties fuel, energy, petrol, and, as Vladimir Bukovsky puts it, ‘the system turned out not even able to pillage itself efficiently’. More and more of the GNP — one third in 1980 — went on investment, and a rough fifth went on defence, but the investment led nowhere. The statistics were in any case fictional, and in 1987 the economists Vasily Selyunin and G. I. Khanin challenged the whole set, claiming that the national income had grown far less since 1928 than had been suggested; growth rates had declined from the 4 per cent of the later sixties to 1 per cent; any growth was a statistical illusion, ascribable to inflation. It is an extraordinary fact that the most vociferous anti-Communists, starting with Reader’s Digest, understood such things much better than all the institutes set up for sympathetic study of the Soviet economy (for which ‘production’ would be an apter description). Time was to come when, at St Antony’s, Oxford, a Polish or Hungarian professor, didactically bearded, in a shiny brown suit, would lecture on such subjects as the possibility of market reforms under Socialism, and be discovered, a little later, buying Marks and Spencer female underwear from his expenses. Outdated technology and the exhaustion of plant caused shortfalls, and the quality of consumer goods was dismal; and, besides, the printing of money was causing a great overhang of deposits in savings banks, of 20 billion roubles in 1965 and 91 billion in 1975 (in 1985 more than twice that).
Technology, here, was the prompter. Already in 1975 Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, had noted with alarm the rise of new ‘smart’ American weaponry. The ‘smart’ bombs were one aspect, but there was much more. A French historian of philosophy, himself a one-time Communist, Alain Besançon, wrote the best analysis of Soviet Communism (called ‘Anatomy of a Spectre’). It had an ‘A’ system, which was very ‘A’, an illustration that the Revolution was better at the best than the West. That was the Bolshoy, the satellites, the foreign ministry, sophisticated people speaking languages. There was a ‘B’ system, very ‘B’, which produced the consumer goods. There was a surreptitious ‘C’, which was the reality, and in which everyone lied and stole. When Communism collapsed, it was the ‘C’ system which came to the top. Now, in 1980, the ‘A’ system was under challenge. Its missiles were being frustrated in space. But the ‘B’ system was challenged as well, since ordinary people could understand how dismally ‘real existing socialism’ looked after them, in comparison with what happened in the West. Men and (they tended to be more acute in Russia) women in the intelligentsia worried, and wrote memoranda. Other citizens responded differently, and stole or lied with greater sophistication. In modern society revolution is not possible. The alternative is sabotage, and that was what was happening: a permanent Bummelstreik, as Stefan Wolle said of East Germany.
Alain Besançon has a passage to illustrate the problem:
Take a statement such as ‘The USSR with an annual output of 145,000,000 tons of steel is the first metallurgical power in the world’. Everyone knows that the USSR produces fewer cars than Spain, that its domestic appliances are not comparable with ours, that the railway network is hardly longer than India’s, that the motorways are far inferior to France’s, and that production of tanks, however ultra-lavish, cannot account for more than one or two million tons of steel. What, therefore, can this figure of 145,000,000 tons mean, given that it is higher than that of Germany’s and Japan’s put together, while they produce about twelve million cars and much else? The conclusion has to be drawn that these 145,000,000 tons include
(1) Production of real steel
(2) Production of low-grade steel
(3) Production of useless steel
(4) Production of steel for rust
(5) Production of pseudo-steel and
(6) Pseudo-production of steel
There were other comparisons, for instance with Spain, and on the official figures these meant something. However, again reality — a mere glance at a Moscow market selling shrivelled potatoes or dubious meat — told a quite different story. The USSR might be compared with, say, India, but even then there were problems. If you saw Soviet advisers returning from such places, their suitcases would be full of tomatoes, bunches of ballpoint pens, hams, jeans. The USSR had in fact less foreign trade than Belgium, fewer cars than Brazil, fewer telephones than Spain. The writer Boris Souvarine had said in 1938 that the very name ‘USSR’ contained four lies. He had gone on:
rights of man, democracy, freedom — all lies. Five Year Plans, statistics, achievements, results: all lies. Assemblies, congresses: pure theatre, staged. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: a huge imposture. Spontaneity of the masses: meticulous organization. Right, Left: lie upon lie. Stakhanov: liar. Stakhanovism: a lie. Radiant life: lugubrious farce. The New Man: an old ape. Culture: barbarism. The Genius Leader: an obtuse tyrant.
Resistance took various forms. One was a strike by women. They no longer made children, and (as the writer Sonja Margolina said) complained that the system had turned the men into babies, with no pride or responsibility. From 1965 to 1985 the population had risen from 230 million to 275 million, but the average growth rate fell from 1.8 to 0.8 per cent, and there were large regional disparities. The Russian rate fell from 13.1 per cent around 1960 to 5.7 per cent in 1985, the Ukrainian from 9.4 to 4.3 per cent. Estonia and Latvia had the lowest birth rates in the world. However, the Tadzhik rate was much higher — a 50 per cent increase in a decade. Besides, the death rate rose, uniquely among advanced countries. A man died at seventy in 1969, at sixty-two in 1979, and infant deaths were not even recorded if they occurred in the first year. In 1986 a quarter of the district hospitals had septic tanks for sewage disposal, and a fifth had no running water. Yet abortions, given the absence of proper contraception, ran at 7 million cases per annum as against 4.9 million live births. Family size dropped to 3.5 persons in Russia and even less in the Baltic, though it still stood at around 5 in central Asia. Meanwhile, a woman’s lot was not a happy one: three quarters of women were involved in manual labour, including construction, and certain professions, notably schoolteaching, were feminized (75 per cent). It was they, too, who queued, losing twenty-one days per annu
m even in 1970.
Meanwhile there was another classic sabotage-cum-escape, alcohol, and under Brezhnev alcoholism turned into an epidemic. In 1979, perhaps 18 million people passed through the sobering-up stations (vytrezviteli) run by the militia, and a tenth of the population of Leningrad was arrested for drunkenness. In 1980 50,000 people died of it, and if murders are included, 200,000. It accounted for half of the divorces — in the towns of European Russia, half of the marriages — and divorce (at 250 roubles) was quite expensive. All in all, alcohol was said to take 10 per cent of the national income. In the factories business could not really be done after midday, often enough, and the Poles reckoned that there was a ‘morphology of Communism’ in that piggy-eyed, fat and flushed faces showed the results of complicated negotiations between power-wielders, left by their assistants to sort out common problems in false alcoholic concord.